Political safety on gun issues relies on meaningless terms and disregarded details.
A background check before buying a gun--what does that mean, anyway?
It's whatever the politician wants it to be.
The competent modern politician can bend the term and himself elastically, stranding voters in that great land of misunderstanding where the competent modern politician prefers his voters.
President Trump mouths in interviews that he wants to do "something strong" on background checks for gun purchases. But he never says what kinds of background checks he supports, or for whom, or under what circumstances.
The president is not detail-oriented, if you'll forgive the understatement. He's a generalist, a simpleton. He's looking for a moment on Fox, CNN or MSNBC. C-SPAN bores him with all that detail.
Meantime, Gov. Asa Hutchinson tells Talk Business and Politics that, oh, no, he couldn't possibly support the concept of "mandatory, universal" background checks because "mandatory" and "universal" tell him that a neighbor couldn't sell a gun to a neighbor without an undue burden of paperwork.
Lord knows we can't have paperwork. Handing a semiautomatic assault weapon over the fence and getting cash passed back, and having the transaction remain as simple as that and nobody else's business--that's a right plainly stated in the Second Amendment, don't you know?
It's not as if selling a gun to your neighbor is as serious as selling him a car, which would require ... you know ... paperwork.
Hutchinson managed to avoid altogether whether he could support any kind of expansion in the current background checks required of licensed dealers, perhaps to begin also applying to gun-show and online sales. Instead he slew his next-door straw man.
The governor avoided altogether as well the explicit exceptions of the Toomey-Manchin bill in the U.S. Senate. That measure, now six years old, would spare background checks on gun transactions with relatives all the way to cousins as well as in ill-defined personal friendships such as with neighbors.
Basically, Toomey-Manchin says that the same background-check process applying now to gun purchases from licensed dealers would also apply to guns bought at gun shows and over the Internet. Period. Everything between individuals could be called a family or personal matter.
Hutchinson is silent on those generous provisions. Thus, we shouldn't forget that he is an old NRA employee, having been hired to cook up a pro-gun response to the Sandy Hook slaughter of little children. Arm the teachers, our governor dutifully recommended.
Hutchinson seems cowed by the rural gun culture so long as he might run for another political office, which he's said he'd like to do.
If he were committed to retirement after this second term, he might ... well, I perhaps extend him too much credit by speculating that, on guns, he's anything other than the unreconstructed offspring of Charlton Heston and John Wayne.
The governor reaches for safe words like "mandatory" and "universal" while his president reaches for "something strong." Neither of them says anything. Neither of them accomplishes anything.
As yet, Trump won't say whether his support for "something strong" on background checks would extend to the open-ended exceptions of Toomey-Manchin that Hutchinson pretends don't exist.
It's because Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn't yet told Trump that he is willing to take Toomey-Manchin to the floor and inconvenience some of his GOP senators with a vote they'd rather not have to make.
There's political danger for Republicans either way, and political danger apparently can be a stronger congressional consideration than gun danger in a Walmart.
But there's hope. The word is that Ivanka Trump has been phoning around to McConnell, Patrick Toomey and Joe Manchin to see whether Daddy might be able to do something on background checks.
Be advised that that is leaked information, unconfirmed from one of the big newspapers. The further word is that Ivanka maybe does some of her own leaking to make herself seem her daddy's moderating force.
Through it all, there is a substantive and worthy background-check bill that has passed the Democratic U.S. House of Representatives by 240-190 and sits in the Senate where McConnell simply refuses to acknowledge its presence.
The measure says that all gun-show, online and personal gun sales must be subjected to the same background-check process used already in purchases from licensed gun dealers. Then it exempts gifts of guns among spouses, the lending of guns for hunting, trapping or sport shooting and the short-term conveyance of a gun for defense against a threat.
Let's say there'd been armed robberies in your neighborhood and a concerned party offered to lend you a gun for a few days until the threat passed ... you could accept that legally without a background check.
It's a perfectly fine bill, sitting there collecting Senate dust while the president bellows on cable about doing "something strong."
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/15/2019